The changing art of business development

A soon-to-be-released Deltek survey will put the problem facing government contractors today in stark perspective.

More than 425 companies, ranging in size from small to large to multi-national, answered our Clarity survey. They reported average growth during 2011 of just 7.3 percent – half the rate reported just a year earlier.

Yet, when we asked them to name the challenges they face, "limited business development resources" made the top three. Only "a more restrictive spending environment" and "increased competition" scored higher – both of which are generally outside of a company's control.

Business development, however, can be done well, or done poorly.

Over the past decade, frankly, it hasn't always mattered much. With government spending growing at almost unprecedented rates, it was possible to grow your business with a fairly limited understanding of business development.

But that isn't true anymore. With spending on a downward glide slope, there is little chance of organic top-line growth unless you take business from your competitors, or actually buy them – neither of which is easy to pull off with "limited business development resources."

So what can you do?

Business development resources, generally speaking, are people. That said, focusing squarely on headcount isn’t the solution.

I am not a business developer. I have, however, worked closely with many on both sides of the acquisition table throughout my career and can recognize the key characteristics that bring tangible results. Selling skills are of course important, but not the predominant characteristic.

A good business developer is someone who doesn't just arrive at work with relationships, but cultivates those relationships and builds new ones over time. A focus on customers, teaming partners, corporate movers and shakers, and industry influencers is essential.

Because again, while relationships matter, I've found that a good Rolodex has a half-life of about 18 months. Contacts erode. Conflict-of-interest rules and waiting periods complicate matters, as does simple attrition – the people who know you move, change jobs, or retire.

That's why a good business developer constantly networks to build new relationships and keep old relationships productive. Often that involves an investment of generosity: helping a member of your network now when the quid pro quo may not be realized until months down the road.

And beyond relationships, business development involves strategic thinking. For the past decade, it's been easy to succeed simply by chasing a large pipeline of individual opportunities and relying on the probability of a win. That isn't true anymore. There are fewer big-dollar opportunities and competitive dynamics are taking the reliability out of win probabilities.

Today, success isn’t solely about developing a good response to a request for proposals; it's about developing a strategic response to the landscape. A good business developer can synthesize disparate resources into a coherent response to today's challenging market, and explain to potential customers how it will make their jobs easier. It’s called “connecting the dots,” visualizing the potential cause-and-effect among unlike things.

That may mean taking a clever solution that worked for one agency and applying it to a completely different agency you've never worked with before. It may mean taking what you learned from one solution and applying it to a totally different discipline outside your comfort zone. It might even mean giving up revenue in the near term as you try something different and unproven.

It does not mean, however, that a business developer's job is simply to fill a pipeline with roughly similar prospects and approach them all with the same pitch one by one, calling it success when one bites.